Society's got priorities wrong.
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most car travels are 1 person or sometimes 2 person
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the majority of car travels are quite short, less than 40km.
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many car travels are just to get some groceries or drop of a little package or just say "hi" to someone, carrying nothing but themselves.
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cars are fucking expensive, to buy and to maintain
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accidents become way worse with heavier vehicles
Microcar is a valid answer to all of these, while still being sheltered from weather.
How are urban places (i'm in Belgium) with almost permanent super heavy road traffic congestion, bad climate statistics, high polution values, very limited available space left, no self-sustaining energy production and high traffic accident statistics still pooring in billions and billions in subsidies year after year into "regular" big heavy SUV-like vehicles instead of these? It's beyond my comprehension. The only real valid reason i somewhat get is the collective scare of being in a crash and not wanting to be in the smaller vehicle. We could save the climate, we choose not to.
- MICROLINO: 17.990 €
- OPEL ROCKS: 8.699 €
- CITROEN AMI: 7.790 €
- RENAULT TWIZY: 13.000 €
- FIAT TOPOLINO: 9.890 €
A lot of people here casually spend more on a sunday racing bike every few years for fucks sake.
a lot of it unfortunately is too sprawled for tramlines to make sense.
You can see the border between belgium and the netherlands on this pop density map: https://www.luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#9/51.2885/4.5607
Netherlands: "clustered towns with a center". Flanders: "wtf just happened?" We have approximately 13.000 km of "linear settlement"
looking at the map, light rail seems like it should work fine? It's not that sprawly, there are pretty clear urban clusters that you could just slap some rail onto the roads going between.
i think you're presuming the transport has to be profitable? which obviously will only ever justify some subway lines in metropoles and train lines connecting major cities.
No it's just always a battle for space. The linear settlements the old roads run through are wide enough for 1 lane in each direction, 2 narrow sidewalks and perhaps a narrow cycle path. Enter tram: it's either stuck in traffic with the cars or they have to decide to ban cars and no longer serve the hundreds of driveways on a route, politicians don't have the balls for that, not even the green ones. I wish they would.